Cisco Integrated System for Azure Stack Coming Later This Year

Just like HP-E, Lenovo & Dell – Cisco has joined the Azure Stack appliance group. Azure Stack will be released later this year as a turnkey solution, like an appliance, fully built and configured, you just need to buy the thing and turn it on, then you get instant Microsoft Azure in your own datacenter.

Cisco and Microsoft have announced that Azure Stack will be offered on Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) in Q3 2017.

Apache Kafka on Azure HDInsight

Microsoft have announced Apache Kafta on Azure HD Insight….

Incase you don’t know, HDInsight is Storm, Hadoop & Spark. Apache Kafta is the streaming solution for HDInsight. If you thought there was a streaming solution in Azure already, you’re right. There’s Azure event hubs, a technology developed by Azure, but Apache Kafta is the open source offering built on top of the Hortonworks data platform. Azure Event Hubs is more used for multi-tenant services. If you do a comparison from Kafta to Azure event hubs, there’s some limitations, for example the message size in event hubs which is 256KBs. Kafta however, is a simple model, it scales out as you need it, it’s a message ingestion service with real time ingestion, you just point your IoT device to Kafta, any message from anywhere, even Twitter messages. Kafta is all based around topics, there’s the producer that publishes topics, then theres the consumer that consumes the various topics.

Microsoft have announced that Azure SQL Database Threat Detection will be generally available in April 2017.

Azure SQL Database Threat Detection provides an additional layer of security intelligence built into the Azure SQL Database service. It helps customers using Azure SQL Database to secure their databases within minutes without needing to be an expert in database security. It works around the clock to learn, profile and detect out of the ordinary database activities indicating unusual and potentially harmful attempts to access or exploit databases.

Microsoft Azure IoT Hub Now Supports Cassandra Databases

Microsoft have announced the release of a new open source project that enable devices connected to Azure IoT Hub to store data in a Cassandra database.

In case you don’t know, Apache Cassandra is a highly scalable, high-performance distributed database designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers, providing high availability with no single point of failure. It is a NoSQL database.

With this new Cassandra connector, developers can easily build solutions that harness IoT fleets of devices and store the data in Cassandra tables for later analysis. The available GitHub library can be fully customised if needed. Developers can define the schema of Cassandra tables and specify how data should be stored, whether based on the type of the message or by splitting the incoming data into multiple tables for easier analysis. In addition to the Cassandra connector, Microsoft have also released a Docker container to narrow down the deployment and testing of the new library to a matter of minutes.

The first ever IoT Virtual Bootcamp

We’ve discussed a lot about IoT in this news release… IoT will affect billions of devices, generating enormous economic opportunities. Your future career will be hugely impacted by this new wave of innovation. Are you thinking about getting started with IoT development? Would you like some live help to get your hardware up and running? Not sure what you really need in hardware? Would you like to get your hands on some hardware at a discount or Learn about the Cloud and IoT?

Microsoft, Hackster and Raspberry Pi have teamed up to deliver the first ever IoT Virtual Bootcamp! Subsidised hardware, guest speakers like Eben Upton, Zach Supalla, Jeremy Foster and Adam Benzion and classes on how to create enterprise-grade IoT solutions from scratch.

Hear live from Microsoft IoT experts across device and cloud teams and influential industry leaders as they show you everything about IoT in these workshops and hands-on labs.

General availability of Managed Disks and larger Scale Sets

Microsoft have announced the general availability of Azure Managed Disks. With this, you no longer have to worry about the complexity of storage management or worry about storage as you scale. With managed disks, you still have the full power and control from what you expect and love with Azure VMs. Managed disks is like a “PaaS bridge” on Azure IaaS VMs. With Managed Disks, you can now attach data disks to every instance and create a VM scale set of up to 1,000 VMs, an increase of 10X.

Managed Disks free you from storage account scale management. Managed Disks are Azure Resource Manager resources, can be fully templated using JSON and support both Standard and Premium Disk types. You only need to specify the size and type of the disk you want. You can create thousands of Managed Disks without worrying about the storage account and without having to specify any disk details.